Great companies are built and prosper when they have great leaders. Venture investors will often tell you that more than 50 percent of their decision to invest is influenced by whether they back the CEO. If I were being a bit cynical, I would say this is because it’s easier to evaluate the CEO and their chance of success, rather than figure out what the technology is about.

And yet, two years later, investors are disillusioned with the very leader they were so enthusiastic to invest in. If only they could recognize the type of problem they were taking on with the new leader. What are the types of CEOs who are destined to fail their investors?

Company founders can be individuals with an idea whose time they believe has definitely come; professors who have made a discovery in the lab that will be a business; graduate students who see business potential in their research and want to exploit that potential rather than have academic careers like their mentors or serial inventors.

Yet another route is founders who are working in a company, have some ideas in the same or a related industry, and would rather work for themselves than make their boss or shareholders rich. Wherever they come from, the founder of a company usually starts by seeing themselves as the chief executive of the company they are founding.

Startups fail when the CEO is the wrong person, and I want to unpack what ‘wrong’ means. This can be a founder who has the wrong mindset; is lacking in necessary competencies; is missing key skills; and perhaps most importantly, doesn’t have the self-awareness to know that they have a problem or that they are the problem.

1. The technical founder

The first type of these CEO founders is the most innocent: the Purely Technical Leader. This person sees the opportunity and the competitive advantage; they have the vision for the business. They have nothing else that is needed for leadership. They have never hired people for a variety of posts or led a team. Perhaps they have been supervising doctoral students for several years and think that the team in the business will be like that. It isn’t. The ability to build an effective team is the central competency that any business leader needs to have.

As regards doing business, this technical founder usually thinks it is pretty simple: there is income, and there is expenditure. When income is more than expenditure, the company is making a profit, which is a good thing. They think there is little else they need to know.

In other words, they have no conception of working capital or cash management. Nor do they understand the role of debt, depreciation and other non-cash items, or a balance sheet and how to read one. Basic financial skills are lacking, and there is no awareness on the part of the leader that having these skills is important to the success of the company.

These business things are easy to learn; the founder just must appreciate their importance. It is a lot easier to learn the fundamentals of business accounting, essentially a set of skills, than it is to hone your abilities at hiring, leading and shaping a team to do a hard job solving difficult problems, which is a core competency.

The CEO must master both the basic business skills and develop the leadership competencies. In my experience, building the team leadership competency usually requires a willingness to engage in significant personal development with the help of a coach or mentor.

2. The salesperson founder

The second type of failure-prone founder is one of the most dangerous: The Great Fundraiser.  These founders know what buttons to press to convince venture capitalists to part with their money. I have often heard partners in a VC firm remark, after hearing a pitch from one of these founders, “Well, I’m not sure about the business, but that guy is definitely backable.”

This is fine, as long as the business proposition is sound and the founder knows what needs to be done make it a reality instead of an idea. The problem is that this great salesperson founder is so taken up with selling the remarkable story that they don’t see the numerous challenges that lie ahead.

When any of these are raised – “Tell me how you will get the cost of the units down?” “Where will the products be manufactured?” “How will you access the Asian market, which you say is crucial to success?” – the salesperson founder has stock answers to brush these aside: “The costs come down as volume increases.” “We plan to outsource the manufacturing to a firm in Noplace, Idaho.” “We have already set up a relationship with a group in Vietnam to take us into Asia.” (That is, they called their friend’s roommate, whose girlfriend is Vietnamese).

This founder does not see the need for a strong engineering team to solve problems that will occur between idea and reality because they don’t believe that such problems exist.

3. The arrogant founder

A third type of high failure rate founder is The Arrogant. A certain amount of arrogance is desirable in someone who is pushing the boundaries and disrupting an industry. When the founder believes that they are much smarter than they are, they will not take advice from the board or others, inside or outside the company. Indeed, they will react to proffered advice in a way that discourages people from giving it again.

The problem with arrogant founders is that they are so confident, so sure of themselves, that they trivialize the importance of everyone else’s job. Problems with valves clogging? Engineering will sort that out. Patents being challenged? That’s what they pay lawyers for.

You would think that venture investors, having seen this sort of founder before, would be loath to back such a person, knowing that disaster will follow. Quite the opposite. Too often the venture investors see in the arrogant founder just the sort of qualities they admire. Arrogance that is not justified by their abilities or insight.

4. The media star founder

The fourth type of founder who often fails is The Media Star. Inevitably, the more appealing the startup idea, the more disruptive it is, and the greater the attention it receives from press, TED talks and online media. There is a demand for the CEO to appear and talk about the company and how it is going to upend the entire world of… (you fill in the blank). Now, most founders will do maybe one or two interviews, knowing that they have more important work to do if the company is going to succeed.

However, there is a subset of CEOs who find that they love the attention, and moreover, they are good at it. As a result, they get more invitations, which they accept. Sure, this is taking away time from running the company but they rationalize it is building momentum for the idea, undoubtedly increasing the company’s valuation. Moreover, it is something they can do, while there are other people back at the company who are able to solve the day-to-day problems with the business.

This is the opposite of leadership. It is effectively absenting yourself from the job to do something you enjoy more.

These are four types of CEO leadership failures that occur repeatedly. When companies make it through the first few years of life, they have technology that works and are beginning to get some traction in the market; it is failure of leadership from one of these types that often takes the company down.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.